Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Calls for Papers, Calls for Submissions

Dear readers, a quick note: we are moving our growing list of CFPs + calls for submissions on all things fantastical from the blog to the message board. We will be collecting calls for submissions here. Come by to take a look, or to add a call for submissions that you have heard about. Currently we have calls for submissions on American superhero comics, for papers on ghost folklore and urban legends, and other topics. We will grow this resource until it is an extensive and constantly updated list of calls for papers, art, fiction, and poetry on matters of wonder.

The Importance of Wonder and Wonder Stories

These tales say that apples were golden only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water. (G. K. Chesterton)

If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales. (Albert Einstein)

A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician: he is also a child confronting natural phenomena that impress him as though they were fairy tales. (Marie Curie)

If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other--the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales. (G. K. Chesterton)

The experience of wonder continually reminds us that our grasp of the world is incomplete. (Stephen Greenblatt)

It was because of wonder that men both now and originally began to philosophize. (Aristotle)

Benediction

This is not a gray world.

May your days be alive with the electrifying colors of God's presence and wonder.

May you look up and around you even in the midst of your burdens.

May you look for God's love in the faces around you, in the falling of rain, in the sound of footsteps in snow.

May you take in the colors of the life God gives you until your eyes and spirit ache with them.

May you be as a bride seeing in every hour the face of her Beloved.

May your wonder make the colors visible to those who walk with their heads down.

May your surprised joy and your devotion make the voice of God audible to those who walk with their pain loud in their ears.